WWW-based Media On Demand to the Home 
			over Gigabit Networks

		Ola Carlvik,Tomas Stephanson, Staffan Liljegren 
		(ola, tomas,staffan)@medialab.ericsson.se
		Media Lab, Ericsson 
		126 25 Stockholm, Sweden


Ericsson Media Lab have done some prototyping around 
IP-based media streaming in extensible networks with over-provisioning
of bandwith. The prototype uses file semantics to implement several of the 
control features that You expect from a Media On Demand system; video
controls, synchronisation of media types and overlay of meta-information
like close caption information, rating information etc. The use of
file semantics gives a much simpler implementation than explicit control
signalling.

The setup is essentially using a Web browser and video/sound helpers
on the setop box (or client) side. The server side consists of a HTTP server
for providing media file info (file pointer and other relevant attributes) 
and a NFS server for video/sound streaming. 

Using WWW and Java have also made it very also simple to extend 
the user interface and add general Internet services and new 
on-demand services.

Our prototype has been tested on Stockholm Gigabit Network, an experimental 
research testbed, with a distance of 70 km between server and client.
This solution is of course intended for IP islands where it is feasible 
to do an over-provisioning of bandwidth. The network architecture 
for such an island could consist of a switched Ethernet, providing 10 Mb/s 
to clients and 100-622 Mb/s to to a distributed server cloud, which is 
sufficient for MPEG2 delivery to each home.